You and Your Research by Richard Hamming (1995) [video]

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46 points·gmays··10 comments

His book on coding theory was an epiphany for me....

ie. Most books on technical are hard to understand, not because the subject is so hard, but because most author's are crappy at writing books and explaining there field.

Hamming is an example of how are hard topic could be made readable.

His chapter on error correction codes on the You and Your Research book made me finally understand why they work so well. That after undergrad classes, a couple of books, and way too many articles on the subject.

Is there any chance he wrote a book on complex analysis?

My dad (now data science/stats professor) was at the 1986 version of this talk at Bellcore (where he spent almost two decades working). He speaks glowingly of it.

Original transcript and previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349

EDIT: I can have my dad respond on this thread, if anyone has questions about Hamming — or the Bell Labs culture.

Your dad is cooler than my dad :)

I don't have a specific question but I would be interested in reading any books on Bell Labs' culture at the time if he or you are aware of any.

I've been enjoying The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner. It's well written and covers the history of Bell Labs from the early days.

That's the one I'd read as well!

List of books by Richard Hamming - https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/richard-hamming/242314/

His entire lecture series is excellent. It's worth listening and re-listening through the course of a career. Just amazing.

His other topics that are memorable: Creativity, Experts, How do we know what we know?, Mathematics, Information Theory.

Previous submissions, including one from a couple months ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22You%20and%20Your%20Research...

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